Epiphany, which
commemorates the first revelation of Jesus to Gentiles (the Gentiles in this
case being the magi), is the perfect time of the year to think about outreach
and mission. Inasmuch Jesus was sent to the world as the embodiment of God, so
the church is sent as the embodiment of Jesus to love and to serve and to grow
his kingdom. Tonight at our potluck dinner we’re excited to share a new
outreach initiative we’re thinking about. Outreach is the only reason that the
church remains on earth. Everything else we do is just a preview of heaven. Granted,
the earthbound nature of mission does make it rough. It was deadly for
Jesus—and for much of the New Testament church and many Christians since. Ask
any missionary, and if they’re honest, they’ll have all kinds of adversity to
tell you about. The same goes for any Christian who steps it up and steps out
for the sake of the gospel. Just try to do what Jesus says: love an enemy,
serve the poor, speak the truth, share the gospel, forgive an abuser, give away
money, fight for justice—you’ll find it can be a tough way to live.
It was hard for the Old
Testament prophets too. Moses got blasted constantly by his own people. Elijah
was hunted down by the government and put on a hit list. Jeremiah was exiled to
Babylon. Daniel got tossed into a lions’ den. No wonder that when the word of
the Lord came to Jonah he ran for his life. God told him to go at once to
Nineveh and forecast its doom on account of their wickedness. Nineveh was the
capital of Assyria, the ancient nemesis of Israel’s northern kingdom. Sort of
like Green Bay is to Minneapolis. Any good Hebrew would have delighted in their
downfall, just as every good Vikings fan relished the fall of the Packers last
Sunday. But Jonah said no. Admittedly, if my intent is to preach about mission
and outreach, Jonah is an odd choice. Consider it a bit of unfinished water
business—if you’ll recall all those sermons last fall. I did leave Jonah’s
watery adventure out of the rotation. Consider it also a foretaste of Easter.
Comparing himself to Jonah, Jesus said: “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of
the great fish, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in
the heart of the earth.”
Given Jonah’s disobedience and cowardice, it is strange to have
Jesus make the comparison. Jonah reminds me more of that cruise ship captain in
the news this week. Reportedly wanting to show off his $450M ocean liner to gawkers
on shore, he steered off course, hit a reef and ruptured the hull of his ship.
As water gushed in and the boat listed, passengers panicked including the
captain who abandoned ship for the safety of a lifeboat. Or as he explained it,
he accidently tripped and fell into a
lifeboat when the ship tipped to its side. A furious Coast Guard officer
radioed the captain to get his butt back on board—using an Italian bad word
that is now available all across the country on handbags and espresso cups. One
Italian newspaper claimed the episode contrasted the “two souls of Italy” —one
of them represented by a “cowardly fellow who flees his own responsibilities,
both as a man and as an official” and the other by a man who works to get the
coward to do his job.
Jonah is the only Old
Testament prophet to flee his responsibility. The only one to refuse an
assignment. The only prophet to reject a direct command from God. Like an
employee who skips out early to avoid an unwelcome assignment, or a soldier who
goes AWOL to avoid following an order, Jonah flees the word of the Lord. He runs
in the opposite direction from Nineveh to the seaside city of Joppa where he
finds what was known as a “Tarshish ship,” the ancient equivalent to a modern
day ocean liner. We read that Jonah “paid his fare”, but the Hebrew actually
says he “paid her fare,” meaning he
bought the whole boat. He didn’t want this cruise ship making any stops along
the way. Of course being a prophet and knowing the Lord as he did, it’s difficult
to imagine where Jonah thought he could hide. As the Psalmist sings, “Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence? … If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there… your hand shall hold
me fast.” What for most reads as a psalm of consolation was for Jonah a psalm
of calamity. He knew he was doomed.
Like any defied boss or disobeyed commander, the Lord could
not countenance such insubordination on the part of his prophet. So God hurled a hurricane at Jonah’s boat, so furiously
that the experienced sailors on board feared for their lives. They started hurling cargo overboard and praying to
every god they could think of. Jonah, meanwhile, was somehow sleeping below
deck. The picture reminds me of the young son of friends who would fall fast
asleep every Fourth of July once the fireworks commenced. It was how he dealt
with the stress. It also reminds me of Jesus asleep in a boat as a storm raged
and threatened to sink his disciples—experienced sailors too. Like the sailors
with Jonah, the disciples screamed at Jesus demanding to know why he didn’t seem
to care that they drowned. What did they expect Jesus to do? The same thing the
sailors and their captain expected from Jonah: “Wake up! Say a prayer! Maybe
your God will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.” Of course, Jonah,
like Jesus, knew exactly how to stop the storm—Jesus much more directly, of
course. This may also explain why each slept so soundly.
In ancient times bad weather was always somebody’s fault,
so the sailors drew straws to see who was to blame. Once Jonah drew the short one,
the sailors pounced on him for corroborating evidence: “Why has this awful storm come down on us?” they demanded.
“Who are you? What is your line of work? What country are you from? What is
your nationality?” Jonah tells him he’s a Hebrew prophet. That he works for the
God of heaven who created the sea and the land. And that he’s shirking his
work. Leaving the scene. Hopping a lifeboat. Gone AWOL. Hearing this, the
sailors became even more afraid. “What have you done?!” they shriek. You work
for the God who made the ocean and you think you can escape God on the ocean?
What kind of dumb prophet are you? They demand to know how he plans to placate
his God, and Jonah tells them to throw him overboard. And what, make the
sailors guilty of murder on top of harboring a fugitive? I always wonder why
Jonah didn’t just dive in himself. But another way to read this is for Jonah to
say, “Hand me over to the Lord.” Jonah finally surrenders.
Why couldn’t Jonah have
just had them turn the boat around and take him to Nineveh? Wouldn’t that have
made God happy? Like when Jesus tells that parable about two sons, each directed
to go work the vineyard by their father. One son says yes, but then he doesn’t
go. The other son says no, but then changes his mind and obeys. “Which of the two did the will of his father?” Jesus asked.
The answer was the second son, whom Jesus commends. But apparently Jonah
would rather die than change his mind and obey. The author has yet to reveal
why—though if you’re curious you can skip ahead to chapter 4. Jonah says that he worships the Lord,
but his actions betray a duplicity. The contrasting behavior of the godless
sailors further the indictment. They pray while Jonah sleeps. They fear the
Lord, Jonah rejects the Lord. The sailors are willing to do whatever God wants,
as soon as they can figure it out. Jonah knows exactly what God wants, but
cannot stand to be a part of it.
I was sharing with the Friday Morning Men’s Group this week
how I ended up as a minister. I heard the call at a fraternity party of all
places. But then again Jesus was something of a party guy. I can’t exactly say what
happened. I hadn’t been drinking. I just got this sense that ministry was for
me. I confirmed the notion with a couple of friends and mentors, and by the
next afternoon had dropped my business major and picked up religion and Greek. My
fraternity brothers were horrified. They’d thought me to be rather normal. But
instead I was throwing away a budding and creative career in graphic design and
marketing for sake of pot luck suppers and committee meetings? They did have a
point. You don’t have to go to seminary or work in a church to do the work of
the Lord. If anything, the Kingdom of God could probably do more, missionally
speaking, with fewer pastors and more Christians viewing themselves as
“ministers” in other vocations. As the apostle Paul exhorts us, “Whatever you
do, work at it with all your heart, working for the Lord and not for people.”
When our jobs are done before God, they have their own integrity apart from
anything else they might accomplish, for the labor itself brings glory to the
Lord. I could do whatever career I wanted for the Lord. Had I been drinking?
People do make a lot of decisions when in their 20s that we really shouldn’t be
allowed to make.
Maybe my fraternity brothers were right. So I delayed going
to seminary, just to be sure. I could still do plenty of ministry in the
meantime. In fact, I’d been invited to lead a small group as part of a Christian
fellowship conference. Unfortunately, the conference fell on the same weekend
as my university graduation. But the girl I was dating was going to the
conference, and delaying seminary was going to give me more time to spend with
her. So I decided to have the university just mail me my diploma. My parents
tried to talk me out of it; said they at least deserved a moment in the sun for
putting me through school, but I’d made up my mind. Besides, in addition to
becoming a pastor, God also told me that this woman could be the one. So my mom
made me a cake with a little plastic graduate figurine on top and I ate a piece
and that was basically it.
Up at the conference, the
woman for me decided I wasn’t for her. I think she said God told her that. She
was up for marrying an ad exec, but what woman in her right mind would ever opt
to be a preacher’s wife? Rejected, I went back home to live with my parents who
informed me that if I was going to live with them I would need to pay rent. With
extra money each week if I wanted laundry. So now I needed to make some money. I
tried my hand at the only thing I could find: selling dictionaries and Bible
story books door-to-door.
My first day on the job I
called on a mobile home and was greeted by this lowly housewife who politely agreed
to hear my pitch. I was in the middle of it when her husband drove up in his
pick-up, saw my car, came bursting through the door, caught me showing
dictionaries to his wife and went full vent into a violent and jealous rampage.
“I oughta kill you,” he shouted. He let loose such a string a expletives that I
couldn’t help but suggest he might like one of my dictionaries, just to amend
his vocabulary. Instead he went for his shotgun which was my cue to leave. Needless
to say I didn’t sell a single book. I drove home to discover that the postman
had unceremoniously delivered my college diploma into our mailbox. I pulled it
out and stared at it and then it hit me: the best years of my life were now
over. College was finished, my girlfriend was gone, my parents were charging me
rent, my friends had moved on to lucrative careers while I had crazy husbands
pointing shotguns at me, a pathetic peddler of books trying to make money for seminary
in order to become a minister. Just throw me overboard and put us all out of
our misery.
The sailors finally
concede, but not without first praying to the Lord they’d never met and begging
him not to hold this deed against them. Again, the pagan sailors display more
reverence than Israel’s prophet. “Do not make us guilty of innocent blood;” they pray, “for it is you, O LORD, who has done as it pleased
you.” Jonah knew this too. The sailors pitched him overboard and the storm
stopped. Like with the disciples in the boat with Jesus: the storm terrified them
all right, but Jesus stopping the storm
scared the crap out them. Like the disciples, I imagine these sailors turning
white as sheets, their eyes a-bug and their mouths agape as they say,
“Oh-my-God!” Which really is the point of both stories.
And yet despite Jonah’s
disobedience, God won’t let him drown. Instead, “the LORD provided a huge fish
to swallow up Jonah; and Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and
three nights.” If the book ended here, you’d conclude that “to swallow” is the
same as “to eat.” It wasn’t good enough for disobedient Jonah to drown. God
wanted him digested too. But knowing the rest of the story, we know that what
looked like Jonah’s demise was in fact his salvation. Which is why Jesus ties
his own death to this story. And also why early Christians used the fish as a
sign of their faith and stuck fish shaped bumper stickers on the back of their
burros. Jesus called his resurrection the “sign of Jonah.” Even though Jonah
rejected the Lord and disobeyed his commands, God saved him anyway. We’re left
with this question: If salvation was the outcome of Jonah’s disobedience, what
will things be like when he finally decides to obey?
For me it meant finally
getting to seminary and into ministry where despite plenty of hardship, I’ve
come out with more than my share of joy. I’m very grateful man for whom God has
granted all sorts of grace as I’ve shared the lives of his people in this great
mission we know as the church.
As
we will see with Jonah, the grace that saves us does not absolve us of
responsibility. But neither does it bully us into obedience. I like how the
fifteenth century mystic, Julian of Norwich envisioned grace as courtesy rather than coercion; as invitation rather than
imposition. “Grace works with mercy,” she said, “by lifting up, rewarding, endlessly
surpassing all that our loving and our travail deserves, spreading abroad and
making plain the high abundance and largesse of God’s royal Lordship in his
marvelous courtesy. … ” she said, “He comes to us, to the lowest part of
our need. For he despises nothing of what he has made. … he surrounds us so
tenderly while we are yet in our sins.” And even when we, like Jonah refuse the
embrace, grace still surrounds us like a mighty ocean, until finally, grace
swallows us whole and we really can’t refuse it anymore.
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